God, if You're Not Up There . . . (9 page)

B
ill and Pat Mullaly and I used to study the big names doing their stand-up routines to see how many laughs they got. With a stopwatch in hand, we watched Jerry Seinfeld’s routine at the University of Florida and counted ten laughs a minute, and he’d
end
with an applause break. Jay Leno and Bill Cosby got that many too. It was incredible.

I
won a stand-up contest for Funniest Comic in Orlando. My prize was being sent to the Laugh Factory in Los Angeles, where I would do a spot on
Comic Strip Live
, a popular stand-up showcase that aired weekly on Fox starting in 1990. The producer came to see me do my set. In the middle of it, I saw the silhouette of him throwing his arms up in disgust as he rose and left the room. He called my manager, who told me later he’d said, “How dare you send me this fucking amateur?”

O
ne night at a club in Orlando where I’d done a whole bunch of impressions, an attractive young woman comic got onstage after me. She pulled out the largest carrot I’ve ever seen and said, “I’d like to see Darrell Hammond imitate
this
.” The place went crazy. I had to agree, it was pretty fucking funny.

So I married her. A couple of times.

A
nd then life dropped another bomb in my lap. One day in 1991, Dean, my sponsee, came to talk to me. He was in a bad way after having just been fired from his job. Apparently he’d been caught kissing another man, although why that was a firing offense, I have no idea. I guess it was that this wasn’t the West Village, this was uptight Orlando, and Dean was a married guy with two kids. That night, he told me he was in love with me. I was shocked. When I told him I wasn’t gay, that seemed to be the last straw. Dean used to joke that if he ever wanted to kill himself, he’d use a .357 Magnum. I never found that very funny, and less so when he finally did it. His wife was too distraught to give me the news. I can still hear his seven-year-old daughter’s voice on my answering machine, telling me her daddy had killed himself.

I. Freaked. The. Fuck. Out.

In that moment, I thought I could hear flies buzzing in my ears. My senses seemed to cross boundaries with other senses, a smell I could feel, a fear I could hear. The whole room seemed to fill with the blare of a thousand strident trumpets.

I ran down to an AA meeting in Winter Park, but the meeting didn’t work. I ran into Dean’s sponsees, and I had to tell them what happened.

He had a closed-casket funeral.

I read a book called
In Tune with the Infinite
, which said that the first hour of the day, your mind is a clean sheet of paper, and you can write whatever you want on it. So I read positive-thinking literature like Emmet Fox’s
Seven Day Mental Diet
for an hour every morning as soon as I woke up. I wouldn’t allow my brain to think its own thoughts, or I thought I would lose my mind.

I did that for a year, but I no longer had faith in God or in the Program. I went to Overeaters Anonymous meetings too, because for a while after Dean’s suicide, I couldn’t eat, and then I couldn’t stop. Eventually I quit going to all meetings, and I started to drink again. Five years of really good, productive sobriety, gone. My life had been better than I ever could have believed: I was making good money doing voices, I had a beautiful wife, I had a gorgeous apartment where I lay out by the pool slathered in suntan lotion, an item you would not find in my medicine cabinet today. I felt Dean’s suicide was directed at me, and it worked. I had to leave Florida.

It seemed like a good time to give New York another try.

S
even years had passed since I’d flamed out of New York. I had a lot more going against me now, not least of all that I was in my mid-thirties, which is way too old to start a comedy career. And did I mention I was drinking again? It bears repeating.

My first gig in New York was at a short-lived club in Yonkers, a suburb of New York City.

The home of Mary J. Blige, Ella Fitzgerald, and DMX—and with W. C. Handy Place right off of Central Avenue—what were they thinking? Can you imagine poor DMX, a black Jehovah’s Witness, living in Yonkers? I can just see him knocking on the door of some Irish or Italian family on Tuckahoe Road, trying to spread the word of God. His only hope was if he picked Steven Tyler’s family home on Pembrook Drive. Like he was commenting on an
American Idol
contestant’s performance, Tyler would have loved that: “I thought your preachin’ was great, just great, DMX. You sang like a duck and you quacked like a singer, fiddle-de-dee kiss my little finger.”

Anyway, the gig was at a place called Grandpa’s Shooting Stars. Owned by Al Lewis, the actor best known for playing Grandpa on the sitcom
The Munsters
, although he did a fine turn in
Car 54, Where Are You?
before that, it was a classy joint with fishbowls on the tables, and the drinks all had long, long straws. The audience sat there sucking on these giant straws, and after eighteen minutes of a forty-five-minute set, they started to boo. I heard someone in the audience say, “He’s wounded, finish him off.” I slunk off the stage. At least I got carfare to get home.

And it was still the best gig I got. I was turned down by every club in Manhattan because I did impressions, and they were prejudiced against that. It was seen as a novelty act, and serious comedy clubs don’t like novelty acts, guitar acts, prop acts. People looked down on it.

W
hen I worked at the Skyline Motor Inn when I first lived in New York, I was living uptown in Washington Heights on 163rd Street. When I moved back to New York with my wife, we started out even farther uptown, at the very northern tip of Manhattan in Inwood. But eventually, after we realized living together wasn’t working out that well, I ended up on my own in an apartment at 688 Tenth Avenue between Forty-eighth and Forty-ninth streets in Hell’s Kitchen. Coincidentally, my building was across the street from the Skyline Motor Inn.

One afternoon when I didn’t have much else to do, I was browsing through a bookstore, looking for something to read. Like my father, I was always drawn to stories of law and order, anything from Wyatt Earp and the frontier justice of the Old West to the sordid true crime tales of modern organized crime. I was trolling this section of the store when I saw a paperback with a photograph of the street sign on my corner on the cover. What were the chances? I had to get it.

The author was T. J. English, an Irish-American journalist who wrote for
Irish American Magazine
during the 1980s, and his book,
The Westies: Inside New York’s Irish Mob,
chronicled the bloody misadventures of one of the most brutal gangs in the annals of New York organized crime. Unbeknownst to me, the Irish mob ruled Hell’s Kitchen during the 1970s and ’80s, exactly when was I working at the Skyline. According to the New York City Police Department and the FBI, the gang was thought to be responsible for as many as one hundred murders over a twenty-year period. Their big thing was chopping their victims up. Oh, and torture.

According to English, in the 1960s, a Hell’s Kitchen native by the name of Mickey Spillane ran the organization. To be perfectly clear, this was not the beloved crime novel writer who invented the fictional hard-boiled detective Mike Hammer portrayed by Stacy Keach on TV during the 1980s. No, there wasn’t anything make-believe about
this
Mickey Spillane, and he ran his crew much the way the Dapper Don, John Gotti, would run the Gambino crime family years later—while he operated gambling and loan sharking rackets, tossing in assaults and murders as needed, he also served as benefactor to the local community, earning his nickname “The Gentleman Gangster” by doling out turkeys on Thanksgiving, thereby ensuring the loyalty of everyone around him.

Things got interesting in Hell’s Kitchen in the early 1970s, when Spillane’s power was challenged by a young thug by the name of Jimmie Coonan, whose father Spillane had roughed up. Spillane fled to Queens, and Coonan took over. Spillane was eventually shot to death outside his apartment in Woodside moments after saying good night to his twelve-year-old son, Bobby, in 1977.

Coonan eventually joined forces with “Fat Tony” Salerno, who was a big cheese with the Genovese crime family, to split the proceeds in the construction of the Jacob Javits Convention Center at Forty-second Street. Coonan later buddied up with the Gambinos, a partnership that was later taken down by an ambitious Italian-American federal prosecutor by the name of Rudolph Giuliani.

Coonan got sixty years for his trouble. So did one of his top enforcers, James McElroy, aka Jimmy Mac, the guy who didn’t like to pay for his drinks at the Skyline. Jimmy Mac recently died in the California prison where he was twenty-five years into his bit. I read that at his May 2011 funeral at the Church of the Holy Cross on Ninth Avenue and Forty-second Street, a fair-sized crowd of people from the old neighborhood showed up to pay their respects to the man known for driving what they called the “meat wagon,” which ferried body parts of the Westies’ victims to be dumped on Wards Island, a lovely oasis in the middle of the East River known for its massive psychiatric hospitals that house the city’s criminally insane, a sewage treatment plant, and, because Robert Moses may have been the most interesting city planner of all time, a lovely park.

And all this time, as far as I was concerned, these guys had been polite, tipped well, and encouraged me to do stand-up.

Even after I read the book, nothing I learned tarnished my feelings for those guys. Years later, one of my dearest friends was Bobby Spillane, that twelve-year-old kid whose father was murdered. Bobby, an actor who had appeared on
Law & Order
and
NYPD Blue
, kept me sober a hundred times over the years. In the summer of 2010, Bobby fell to his death out a window of his sixth-floor apartment on Fifty-third Street and Eighth Avenue. He’d just returned from a vacation, and his unpacked bags were still inside the apartment. At the time, Bobby had been collaborating with my old
SNL
office mate Colin Quinn on a one-man show called
A Hell’s Kitchen Story
. The show died with him.

J
ust because I was drinking didn’t mean I wanted to, so I kept fighting the sobriety fight. I attended a regular AA meeting on Forty-sixth Street between Broadway and Eighth Avenue. One of the guys who was also a regular there was supposedly a hit man, who claimed to have whacked eighteen people. He and another guy who was the brother of a well-known gangster had their own meetings in the back, because they didn’t want to share in front of others. The hit man wanted to whack someone in the meeting because he didn’t like him. He told this to Jackie, the big queen who ran the place.

“Look, I have the virus, so I’m not afraid of any of your shit,” Jackie said. “You ain’t whackin’ nobody in my fuckin’ meeting, you understand me?”

Everybody laughed.

“People are trying to get well, and you want to whack somebody? What the fuck is your problem?”

Anyway, the kid never got whacked.

T
hen there was Tommy, who used to brag that he was the best car thief on Long Island. He fell in love with a gorgeous Colombian girl named Valentina.

About six months after he started going out with her, I went up to him and said, “Tommy, you and Valentina are the best couple.”

“Yeah, but Darrell . . .”

I said, “What? You guys are awesome.”

He said, “You know, when I started going out with her, she wouldn’t let me touch her down there. After a few months, she did. She’s got a dick, Darrell.”

Oh.

“By the time I got down there and found out, it was too fuckin’ late. I already loved her!”

A
fter meetings, a few of us would go to the diner on Forty-fourth Street and Ninth Avenue. Hell’s Kitchen might have been rid of the Irish mob by then, but before Rudy Giuliani became the mayor the neighborhood had so many drug dealers and prostitutes and psychos wandering the streets, it was a seriously dangerous place to walk around. So my pal Sebastian, who was the queeniest drag queen you have ever seen, used to walk me home.

If someone said shit to us, Sebastian would snap his fingers and say, “Sweetie, I’m more of a woman than you’ll ever have and more of a man than you’ll ever be, so fuck off!”

Sebastian explained to me that a really successful pimp or a really successful drug dealer doesn’t want to deal with a crazy person. It could fuck up the whole night, and they could lose thousands of dollars. Don’t get into a fight with someone who’s screaming at you, just let the crazy person pass. Made perfect sense to me.

Later, when the dealers found out I lived on Forty-eighth and Tenth and they started to know my face, they said, “No, no, he lives here. Let him through, let him through. He’s neighborhood.” They didn’t want trouble, they just wanted to sell. I used to joke with people that I could buy anything on the planet on my stoop.

A week after Giuliani came into office, police vans started showing up, and these young buck cops came piling out, slapping all the drug dealers around, putting cuffs on. They made something like 130 arrests on my block alone in Giuliani’s first three months. I was told that the guys would get booked, somebody would pay their bail, then Giuliani would have them arrested again. Finally, they got tired of the game and moved on.